Roleplaying Game

Somebody in Boots

Years ago, Ruben had wondered how long it would take for the sun to burn him into ashes. It had been a random notion, one he hadn't seriously entertained, but he thought of that time every now and then. For a man who couldn't see himself in a mirror, he was strangely reflective.

It was three a.m. The bars had announced last call an hour ago. Even in Las Vegas, some laws still held. If you wanted to drink after two in the morning, you had to go home or somewhere else.

He was stepping over the legs of the dead man in the alley, heading towards the sidewalk. He'd learned to eat quietly. Someone would probably find the body eventually, most likely an unlucky garbageman. Nevada was warming up, careening towards summer.

There was a pale moon trying to shine down through the light pollution, and Ruben turned his face up towards it. The moon was cold, remote, but it was also kind. It wouldn't burn him.

The girl stepped in front of the vampire. She was blonde and delicate, with round brown eyes that stared in rapt fascination at the lifeless lump beyond his shoulder. She wasn’t afraid of it. Her arms hung at her sides, the fingers loose near the hem of her skirt. A vague scent of orchid and tea rose wafted from her neck where a faintly twitching pulse showed she was alive.

He'd heard small footsteps approaching, but he'd kept his attention on the sky. At three in the morning, anyone wandering the sidewalks was either not a threat or a threat that could be dealt with. And Ruben had been dead for too long to give a care to what anyone thought.

He was mildly annoyed because she'd distracted hm from remember the words to 'Rock of Ages', though. Some things, you never forgot.

"Awful late for you to be out, little Missus. You ain't worried you might see the boogeyman?"

The muscles alongside her mouth hesitated to work at first, and it made for a strange expression. But then Dori smiled and it was actually becoming on her, if a rarity and, like the tin-man in Oz, once things were well-oiled the muscles worked quite well. “I’m not afraid of death,” she said.

The girl reached out to wipe a speck of blood from his chin. “Messy.”

Dori was intrigued by vampires. It was like watching herself walk and talk in a funhouse mirror. The vampires were not living but they were not Death itself, either. No, that was her (at least, she was one of its forms), yet she was alive in every clinical sense. Two sides of a very macabre coin.

Ruben would have drawn away from her, but the smell of flowers made him stop. The vampire's sensitive nose twitched like a rabbit's. A lifetime ago, his human mother had liked orchids. He looked down at the girl, and it was like meeting someone he knew and simultaneously had never seen before.

"Yer a warm-blood," he said, but he was smiling. His coat flapped open when he spread his arms out, as though he might try to take flight. He was wearing a white button down shirt underneath it. He leaned down farther, looked at her eyes.

"Thought you was a angel," he twanged, straightening up. "But none of them would come near me, for fear I'd clip their wings."

“You couldn’t clip mine,” said Dori, a small challenge in the raised chin, and she found that she rather liked him knowing what she was, that he had made that connection of an angel come to human form. He didn’t recoil from her like people, and he wasn’t confounded by her. But he was comical in the way he spoke and so she played. “I could make you dance like a cartoon frog on a log. Hop on one foot and scratch your head. I could do that, if I wanted.” The words were petulant, but there wasn’t any trace of that in her face.

It was a statement, despite the ever-so-slight turning up of the end of the sentence, and Ruben laced his fingers together on the back of his neck. If he could smell her, could she smell him? Did he smell dead?

"God's a trickster," he told her, still smiling. His weight eased backwards towards the heels of his boots. "They say that when you die, you fly free of your body and go to paradise. But I got dragged back. Touched the divine for an instant, and got cast out like Cain. Guess that means heaven don't want me."

“Were you such an awful person?” she asked, her head tilting. “That God wouldn’t want your soul?” The question was born of intense curiosity and not sympathy. Dori knew that her soul would never reach heaven, not so long as it kept being reborn, at least, and she was not sure it was meant for the place. Was she bad? She certainly wasn’t good.

"I was a thief," the vampire said with a shrug. "The law dogs said I was wrong, clapped me in chains." The shackle was long gone, removed and cast aside, but he still had the scars around his ankle to remind him he'd once worn it. "But I never killed nobody or nothin'. Not until after."

He looked inward, as if at a memory, then shrugged again. His fingers closed around her wrist, not gently but not rough either, and he pressed them to the pulse that beat there. It was strong. Healthy.

But Dori regretted arriving late to the alley, after he had already done what he did. “I wish I had seen,” she said with a regretful look past his shoulder again. Then her eyes brightened. “Could you show me sometime? I’ve never seen a vampire bite anyone.” Death to Dori wasn’t a spectator sport; she did what she did to others, and often she saw accidents, or sicknesses coming to their natural conclusions, but to watch another drain life was a novelty.

Ruben's smile widened, and his eyes flashed yellow before returning to their normal blue. If she hadn't been so clearly Other, he'd have taken it as a sign. Abomination or not, he believed in something.

He took the liberty of touching her hair fleetingly, found the blonde strands clean and silky. She'd touched his face first, after all. He stretched his long arms above his head, as if he was reaching for the moon he'd been staring at earlier, then settled his weight back on his heels.

“Dorothy.” Although she didn’t mind the nickname, it was polite to trade names with a person, especially if you intended to spend time. That was what James told her when she pestered him about why he insisted upon making friends with everyone. If he knew she was keeping company with vampires, he would throw a fit.

“When would you show me? Where were you going just now?” Dori turned towards the open street. “I interrupted.”

He'd have told her he was formerly of the Dust Bowl, but a young thing like her might not have heard of it outside of a history book. The Depression was a long time gone. He barely remembered it anymore, and he'd lived it.

"I figger I can round up somebody," he said, waving a hand up the street. "Bar crawl's over, but there's always stragglers lookin' for that one last drink." He turned on one booted foot, and his coat flapped open again. "You wanna see it up close? I wouldn't want ya to get any on ya."

“I don’t mind.” The sweater she wore was old, threadbare at the elbows, and the skirt wasn’t a favorite. Worse things than blood drops had been washed from her garments over the years, stains and scents her legal mother hadn’t wanted to know about. “You could let me help. I’m good at being bait.”

She led the way into the open and a taxi drove past them, lifting her skirt and hair in its breeze. “But if you want to do it yourself, I’ll watch. I’m good at watching, too.” An insect from a nearby street lamp landed on her sleeve and flitted up to her neck. Dori caught it in her palm and the wings stopped beating.

The vampire made an amused noise, cracked the knuckles of his left hand one at the time. "If'n ya want, I can act like I'm tryin' to get you," he said amiably. "There's always some Christless fool that wants to play hero, 'specially when there's a pretty girl around."

He rubbed a spot above his eye with his thumb, looked ahead of them with his preternaturally sharp vision. Because he was so skinny, he could fool people too. His victims ranged in size from big and fat to the fast runners. The big ones cried more when they realized it was over, but the quick ones took some work to catch. Decisions, decisions...

A cab slowed half a block up, and the rear door swung open. Ruben breathed in oxygen he had no use for. His chest expanded. The passenger alighted on the sidewalk, short and chunky. He was carrying a duffel bag. The vampire let the breath out. His hand touched Dorothy's small shoulder as the taxi rounded the nearest corner and disappeared.

Then she began to walk, employing the fast and stiff-legged gate of a girl who had finally figured out that something was not right and she could be in trouble. Tightly she squeezed her upper arms and cast worried glances over her shoulder at the Bad Man. Then she broke into a run, her breath coming in sharp bursts. “Help me,” the cry quiet and uncertain at first. She tore past the man with the duffel bag and made a ‘wrong turn’ into a secondary street. “Help me!” This time louder. There was a skidding sound of shoes on asphalt as she realized she’d come upon a dead end.

When she turned around to face the Bad Man, her eyes shone with fat, wobbling tears. Real tears.

He cut his speed in half when he went after her, putting on his drunk act, and Duffel Bag shouted "Hey!" when Dorothy called for help a second time. The vampire put a little more speed into it, bumped the human's shoulder as he ran past. Something heavy struck him in the small of the back, and it knocked him just a off-balance. What the hell was in that bag, bricks?

The would-be rescuer came hurtling at him, and fingers skated down the back of Ruben's coat, looking for purchase. They moved into the shadows, the light from the streetlamp failing to cut through the dimness. The mortal grabbed his coat collar, tried yanking him back.

They were out of sight now. Ruben let his face shift, fangs springing to the forefront as his brow ridged. He wondered if Dorothy had ever seen that up close either.

The girl’s hands fluttered at her mouth. “Oh!” She watched Ruben get yanked backward, her narrow shoulders heaving as the vampire’s assailant kept engaging, with no idea of the mess he’d gotten himself into – yet. All because he’d been a bystander who wanted to save her.

Would Ruben show off? Make the incident last longer than necessary? She had no taste for torture or bludgeoning. The pleasure was in the death throes. “Quick..quickly!” she whispered, eager to watch, with a furtive look past them to make sure no one had seen. She dared a step closer. Not too close – she didn’t want to be punched in the face. She bruised like a soft fruit.

The words were distorted because of the fangs, and Ruben yanked free of the human's grip, then spun on one boot. In the dimness of the dead-end street, it was difficult to see, but his eyes were lit from within by something unnatural. Something inhuman. Duffel Bag screamed, tried to backpedal.

Too late.

The vampire knocked him down, slamming the stocky body against the concrete. He could be perfectly brutal when he felt like it, make it last, but now was not the time for games. Dorothy had said she'd wanted to watch, and by God, he was going to let her watch.

It didn't last long, not once he'd battened on. Once Ruben heard the heart stutter to a halt, he drank another sluggish few mouthfuls, then released the bite. His belly felt overly full.

He toed the body, studying t. They never looked like much afterwards. He wondered if God would take this one, or if the devil had dibs.

Dori had stayed out of the way during the scuffle, but now she came around the length of the body. She lowered herself into a crouch near the man’s head. His eyes were open still and so she leaned closer, dirtying her knees on the pavement, all the way until she was nose to nose with the corpse and its fading warmth. The ends of her hair stuck to his neck wound.

Life faded. Impulses stopped firing in the brain. Muscles slackened. In the air around her, Dori imagined that she felt the man’s spirit tethered to the body like a balloon on a string that had not yet been cut.

She raised her eyes to Ruben.

“After I’ve taken a life I feel different.” If he were to see it, Ruben might notice a slight pink in the girl’s cheeks, a new vibrancy in her eyes. Her excitement lent some of that now. She sat up straight. Her hair was stained red at the tips. “Do you feel him inside you at all? His life, I mean, or is it just his blood?”

"Blood is life, Dorothy. It tethers what's within, keeps it from flyin' away. The soul's the shiny prize, but without the red stuff that flows from the heart, that sparkle fades in a hurry."

Ruben was studying the girl now, having already lost interest in the corpse. He thought he heard his stomach contents slosh when he stepped towards her, but that might have been an illusion. He crouched down close to her, his features shifting back to normal. His eyes were bright, like an overly curious bird.

He watched her put her hair in her mouth, and he nodded when she spoke. "It does got a tang to it, don't it?"

He wondered how she killed. If he asked, would she tell him? Show him, as he had showed her? He was not educated, not formally. He wasn't even particularly intelligent. But he had walked the earth for a fair amount of time, and in that time he had learned things. How to make things work. How to take stuff apart and put it back together again. How to make people die.

Ruben's thigh muscles flexed and relaxed, and the cuffs of his pants hitched up when he leaned forward. He wasn't wearing socks, and the scars on his left ankle stood out in sharp relief on the pale flesh.

"Show me?" It was a whisper, although the dead man they hovered over was the only one who could even possibly overhear. "Show me how you do it?"

Dori rocked onto the balls of her feet. Her knees were dusty and she brushed at them with her fingertips. The way he spoke made it sound prayerful, like a sacred thing being shared between them. "Of course," she said. "You showed me." Upon getting to her feet, she extended a hand to the vampire, the palm curved upward in invitation. Her veins were stark and blue in pale flesh.

Dori wandered with him into the street, leaving the scene of his latest killing to be discovered in the morning. She wanted to be more discerning in her identification of a second victim; she believed in a right time for death, an order to things, and she was guided by instinct. She still had a hold of his cooler hand, the calluses on it rough as though he’d been a laborer just yesterday. She tugged him to the north until they came to a girl with dyed red hair, seated within the partial shelter of a bus stop.

Dori watched the girl for a moment. She wore headphones so she was less aware of her environment, and she was deep into the pages of a thick paperback. That wasn’t why she appealed to Dori, and she wasn’t sick from some terminal affliction. It would be difficult to explain, but Dori detected sourness in the set of her mouth and shoulders, a kind of disdain for her surroundings that made it easier to excuse her from the mortal coil. Life, big brother would claim, was a gift even at its worst. It was too quickly snuffed to take for granted. Dori had ushered off people who would’ve loved another week, day, or hour because they recognized that. So she had come to believe that behaving otherwise was tacky.

She turned to the vampire and issued instructions.

“Hold her arms from behind. I’ll do the rest.”

She looked up and down the block. There was no one around. Letting go of his fingers, she began to walk in the girl’s direction like a fellow traveler just waiting for the bus.

The night had become still, or perhaps Ruben felt so much anticipation at what he was abut to witness that he'd blocked out the shadow-song. He wondered if Dorothy's world tunneled down to the size of a narrow corridor as his did when he was about to take a life. When he got close enough, he could hear tinny music coming through the girl's headphones. She had a tattoo on the back of her neck.

"Hey! What..."

"Hush yerself," the vampire said, tightening his grip on her arms as she bowed upwards, trying to break free. "This ain't gonna hurt for long. I don't think."

“Shhh….” Dori bent at the waist and cupped her hands around the girl’s cheeks. The effect was immediate. The fussing stopped, the girl losing herself in the blonde’s gentle eyes and enlarged pupils. “Hello,” she said softly. Her eyes held steady as she eased onto the bench and sat beside the redhead, close enough that their legs touched. When she was comfortable with the connection, Dori placed a palm in the center of the girl’s chest, above her heart and lungs. A spiritualist would label it as the green chakra, but Dori only thought of it as a convergence of life force. She wiggled her fingers. Slowly she began to pull her hand away, and that energy, so necessary to maintaining life, went with her. A perceptive person might see a haze in the air, like a light mist; others would see nothing. Dori stretched the connection between them farther and farther, like a rubber band drawing taut. As she did so, she didn’t blink. She barely moved with respiration. The girl’s eyes widened.

All of a sudden, Dori snapped her hand into a fist. It was done. The girl went as loose as dirty laundry in Ruben’s hands. Her headphones were on crooked.

Ruben's sharp chin was digging into the girl's shoulder, his height making it necessary for him to lean down so that he could watch. He looked like some strange bird of prey because of the way he was perched over her. He saw...something...like a vapor-trail. Having been a part of the dark for nearly six decades, he'd learned that there were more things than vampires that went bump in the night.

When the girl's heart just stopped, like a candle being snuffed out, he was mildly disappointed. He'd expected more of a struggle than that. Still, that was a mighty fine talent Dorothy had. He released the redhead's arms, and she slumped to the left. The music was still playing, and he turned it off because it was annoying him.

"That was beautiful, Dorothy," he said solemnly. "Quiet and deadly, like the sun comin' up."

Death didn’t have to be sadistic; sometimes it was downright anticlimactic. Dori stood up and put a moist hand through her hair. She was winded and wobbly. Her pulse beat just a tad too fast, as if she’d taken a puff from someone’s emergency inhaler and her lungs were full of steroids. The younger and healthier the person, the more jittery she felt.

It was a considering noise, and Ruben's long legs carried his weight over the bus stop bench where the dead girl had slumped over farther. She was now lying on her side. Cool hands cupped Dorothy's warm cheeks.

If he was death, so was she, he knew that now. The vampire leaned down, his blue eyes looking into her brown ones. She could not stop his heart. That deal was long done.

His lips brushed her forehead on a chaste kiss. She was Other, and that meant she was not for him, but she was like him, and that was enough. His hands moved from her face to her shoulders.

“Don’t worry,” she said with her eyes closed. She was glazed over but competent. “I have a brother. He’ll let me stay the night. He’s around somewhere…” Dori looked up at the tall buildings of the neighborhood and knew that she’d find her way to James and his front door in short order. He’d take one look at her and know what Dorothy had done, but there was nothing to be done for it.

She placed her hands over Ruben’s. “You should go inside before the sun comes.”

Because he had done it, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek, which was pale and cool but not smooth. The rough beard hairs prickled her lips. “Have a good night.”

Ruben turned and started to walk away. His stomach was so full that he knew he wouldn't have to eat tomorrow night. As he put more distance between himself and the girl, he began to hum 'Rock of Ages'. Even without the words, it was a fine old song.